Thursday, July 05, 2012

Students Are Smarter Than Your Old eLearning Design

Want to know what regular people think of eLearning? A simple, and regular, search of the term "eLearning" on Twitter reveals an overwhelming portion of NEGATIVE tweets about eLearning experiences. And even worse, they expose the uselessness of the methods being used to assess the learning that is assumed to have occurred during these digital experiences. Quite frankly, it's embarrassing. Check out how "MintToppings" passed her "eLearning" quiz.

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We could look at this with a positive spin and applaud miss MintToppings for her higher order thinking skills and technical ability to game the system in the manner she that she did. Or we could open our eyes to the fact that we still have a lot of work to do. WE, as an industry, need to step up our game.

If you have a next button with slide after slide of content followed by a multiple choice quiz at the end, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG! Find out how to do it right from those who are paving the way towards the future of learning experiences. Some of these folks are your peers, but others come from very different industries and they don't have degrees in instructional design. They come with experience in film, gaming, engineering, theater, psychology, anthropology (HT @moehlert), design, and just about every other creative industry you can think of. The technologies of today and tomorrow, combined with their desire to teach their craft trumps your ID degree.

Anyone with a desire to learn deserves better than a next button and a multiple choice quiz. I'm certain miss MintToppings would agree.